Thumbnail for Excerpts

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Explanation

Welcome to Thumbnail for Excerpts, version 2. The idea of this plugin is to make excerpts have an image near. By default, WordPress strip every tag in excerpts, including images, so the look can be boring. Since WordPress 2.9 there is a mechanism for thumbnails, which still ask for some coding. Not with this plugin! With this plugin your life is easier! Keep in mind that this plugin use the new feature from WordPress 2.9, but works with previous versions too. It will use any specific thumbnail you have indicated manually. In the same time, it will provide automatically thumbnails for all the posts (previous posts for example) which have at least one image, but no manually-indicated thumbnail.

What do you need for this plugin to work? Short version: just activate it (it is activated, since you are reading this) and it will work. Long version: it works 100% for websites which host images locally (not linked remotely) with valid HTML. If you publish with Visual Editor or with programs as Windows Live Writer you don't have to worry. If images from your blog are hosted somewhere else (stealing bandwidth? or using a better hosting solution for media?) than this plugin may not provide the best results - test it to be sure.

What's new from the previous version? In 2.0 the plugin was rewritten to be XHTML valid, smarter and better. For example now it will work even with templates which do not use excerpts (will force the design to use excerpts, see last three options from above). It has a setting page in WordPress back-end (which you see now) from where you can easily setup different aspects (previously you had to edit the PHP file). And yes, there is a default image for posts without images (but you can choose not to use it or to use your own image).

Questions you may ask

I don't use WordPress 2.9. It will crash my blog?No, but it's better to use latest WordPress. Should work from 2.5, but I've only tested on 2.8 and above.

I use the new feature from WordPress 2.9!Good. This plugin will use what you define as thumbnails for posts.

I don't use the new feature from WordPress 2.9!Well, no problem. I guess it's difficult to come everytime in back-end to define a thumbnail for a post. This plugin will provide first image from the post as thumbnail.

I don't see the images!Check first if your images have thumbnails. WordPress create 2 thumbnails for every image you upload in your posts (you can go with FTP in your-blog/wp-content/uploads/ - eventually year/month/ - and check if each image has also small versions, meaning picture.jpg to have also picture-150x150.jpg). If you go to http://themes.cnet.ro/blog/wp-admin/options-media.php this page you should see 150x150 for thumbnail size, 300x300 for medium size... You can choose other values, but keep in mind that what you choose for WordPress thumbnails should be equal or greater that what you choose above in this page. If you put (in the past) 0x0 not to have thumbnails generated for each image, than the plugin will try to use the original (large image). You still can return to using apropiate thumbnails. You can activate above Regenerate, or better use the plugin indicated as a description near Regenerate option.

The thumbnail image is too close to text!Use some CSS! All thumbnail images have a class: wp-post-image (and also tfe). You can indicate margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; for example, if images is left align. In your theme directory you have a style.css where you need to write some rules for thumbnail images.

This plugin do not put thumbnails for galleries!Well, from WordPress 2.9 you can attach to a post with a gallery a thumbnail with whatever image you want from that gallery.